


everything i offered you

by megalopunny



Series: art kids [2]
Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-24
Updated: 2018-03-24
Packaged: 2019-04-07 13:57:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14082459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/megalopunny/pseuds/megalopunny
Summary: The first time she sees him, she’s nude. She’s slipping off her robe, walking out from behind the partition in front of a full class. He peeks out from behind his tall sketchpad, shyly, his face on fire. She smiles at him and he ducks back behind the easel like he was caught doing something wrong. She thinks he’s beautiful. [art school kids au]





	everything i offered you

**Author's Note:**

> for all two of you that wanted more of this.

Aerith keeps a lot of secrets. Anyone that knows her knows that. She talks little of her family, her childhood, her past, and what each acquaintance knows contradicts something another one knows. It’s the way she likes it. She likes people to think of her the way she is now. She likes it when people think she’s collected and ethereal and a little otherworldly. If she has a reputation as a fairy changeling among her friends, it’s because she made it that way.

She’s always composed in her modeling sessions. She’s good at it by now; the tips kept her going through her first year at school. Her moms never had much money, and Aerith choosing to go to art school of all things cleaned out the few savings they did have. She doesn’t like to ask for more than she gets. Extra money for things like wine and cat food and snacks had to come from somewhere.

When she meets Cloud there, she loses any veneer of tranquility she had.

The first time she sees him, she’s nude. She’s slipping off her robe, walking out from behind the partition in front of a full class. He peeks out from behind his tall sketchpad, shyly, his face on fire. She smiles at him and he ducks back behind the easel like he was caught doing something wrong. She thinks he’s beautiful.

He’s far from the first shy artist she’s had; he’s not even the only one in this class that’s having trouble focusing. She can’t help herself - she plays with him. It’s boring work, standing in strange poses for two minute intervals, stare fixed at nothing in particular. She’s allowed to have fun. She says so, anyway. She’ll catch his eye, wiggle her fingers when he’s watching. Once she sticks her tongue out at him. His attention feels nice. Sometimes he even smiles.

After her timer dings, telling her the last pose is over, she stretches, high up, arms above her head, turned back from the class. She doesn’t find out for months that Cloud had sketched her then, quickly, and spent weeks trying to paint the highlights in her hair just right. To capture the way her long hair meets her waist.

She changes back into her robe and slinks around the room looking at everyone’s sketches of her. Cloud slams his book shut before she reaches him. He’s bent over, gathering up his things, trying to leave as fast as possible, when she does make it over to him.

“Aww,” she says with a childish pout in her voice, leaning down to meet him. Her breast slips out from under her robe. Her hair is pooled over one shoulder. “I wanted to see how I looked.”

Cloud can’t look directly at her. “Sorry,” he says, disinterested, and then he’s gone.

 

It’s not that Cloud becomes obsessed with her. It’s information anyone could find, really. Her facebook is public. He learns she’s a photographer, mostly nature and landscapes. He learns she’s 20, to his 19. She lives on campus, like him. She likes to travel. She has a cat, two moms, and a high school sweetheart, unnamed, unpictured. He closes the tab there.

 

Aerith isn’t the type to cheat. But her standards for cheating might be different from most other people. 

She’s interested in Cloud. He’s a fixture at her classes, in the same corner, tucked behind the easel. Most of the other students sit at the tables. It takes three weeks for him to talk to her. It takes a month for him to accept her invitation to coffee, and even then she had to strong arm him into it. He doesn’t think anything of it. Cloud lives so deeply in his own head that he doesn’t even consider Aerith might feel the same way about him.

He’s quiet, but once he starts talking about painting, he can talk for hours. She learns fragments about him this way: the farm he grew up on, his single mother, their financial troubles. She’s charmed by him.

She meets his mother that Christmas, out on the farm. Cloud asked her to stay with them for the holidays. Aerith was so amazed that he took the initiative that she agreed without even considering her schedule.

(She’d apologized to Zack in bed with him, and Zack, laying on his stomach, perched up in his elbows, had told her he wanted to meet Cloud. See what all the fuss was about. He must be really something. Aerith had only smiled.)

Aerith overpacks. Cloud’s car is second or third hand, small, sometimes it complains when he starts it up. The drive is long and Aerith occasionally crawls into the backseat to nap. Off the highway, turns, lonely exits, the noise melts away into quiet two lane roads, flanked with brown winter grass. The sky is grey; the pavement is sunbleached grey. Aerith rolls the window down a crack; the air smells clean.

They arrive hours later at a small ranch. Cloud chews his lip, reconsidering all this. Seeing his home for the first time in months is a shock. With Aerith there, he sees every crack in the wood, the faded paint, the cats running wild. The gate even squeaks when he opens it. He’s mortified.

Truthfully Aerith finds everything charming. She’s lived in the city for as long as she can remember, so everything is new and exciting to her. The chickens scratching around their pen, the goats climbing logs and buckets to watch her, a cow grazing in the field. The silence stretches out for miles. She’s amazed.

She meets Cloud’s mom while he brings in her suitcases. They look a lot alike, with the same blond curls and blue eyes. She treats Aerith the way she would treat her son’s girlfriend, excitedly asking about her hobbies, how they met. There's something in her voice. It's clear she doesn’t believe they’re just friends. Aerith is fine with that.

Cloud’s mother cooks, and they talk over dinner, though Cloud mostly picks at his plate, staring transfixed at Aerith’s surreal presence in his home. She looks cut out of a magazine, pasted in. His house is different with her in it. She brightens everything around her.

Aerith can’t believe it either. The sun sets early, and the darkness that settles over the ranch is unlike anything she’s experienced. There’s no sound in the night. There’s barely any street lights on Cloud’s block. In her guest room (musty, decorated in 70s florals), she sits up in bed with the lights on until her eyes can’t stay open anymore.

And then she swears she hears a scream outside her window.

Barefoot, she pads down the hall to Cloud’s room, doesn’t knock before going in. He’d been asleep until then. She tells him about the scream outside and Cloud laughs. It’s so unexpected, so cute, the way his tired eyes light up, his curly bedhead, Aerith laughs too, breathless, flushed. It was just a fox. He even plays a clip on his phone of fox calls when she doesn’t believe him.

“I’m not gonna be able to sleep after that,” she laughs, her breathing just now stabilizing.

Cloud looks concerned, but doesn’t say anything.

“Maybe I could sleep in here with you.”

He stares at her for too long, eyes wide. Maybe he’s still dreaming.

“Just for a little while?”

“Yeah,” he says, cautiously, hesitating. He doesn’t trust her when she has that tone in her voice. “Take the bed. I can sleep on the floor.”

“Cloud Strife, you will not!” Her hands are on her hips. It’s obvious she hasn’t slept at all: she’s too loud. She won’t give up when she’s in this kind of mood. He squints, rubs his eyes, sighs.

“... Okay.”

In the dark, she can’t see how red he is. Cloud scoots as close to the edge of the bed as he can, losing one leg dangled off the side. Soon, Aerith falls asleep, curled into a ball. This time, it’s Cloud that’s wide awake. With barely any light to see by, he leans over her, watches her breathe, studies her long eyelashes, scoots closer to her. He works up the nerve to run his hand down her long braid. He should’ve known she’d sleep in it.

He rolls the tie off.

He runs his fingers through it, loosening the waves.

Her eyes are open.

He doesn’t notice. She could do anything. She could roll over and kiss him, the way every part of her body is screaming at her to. She wants to. The quiet is broken by her sigh. Behind her, she feels Cloud freeze.

Aerith closes her eyes and shifts closer to him.

 

In the morning, she doesn’t say anything about her loose hair. She leaves it like that the rest of the week. On the car ride back home, Aerith suggests they get an apartment together off campus. “After all,” Aerith says, “we got along so well all week.”

Cloud almost swerves off the road.


End file.
